Then he was lowering his big frame down right next to her, reaching out to roll her against him. Skin met skin, stealing her breath away. His mouth claimed hers and his hands began to wreak magic, shaping her breasts, her stomach, the sensitive inner flesh of her thighs. She still wore silk stockings; deft fingers removed them. She still wore panties; they drifted away next. She moved and writhed to every clever stroke of his fingers. The kiss broke apart as she gulped greedily for breath. She was lost, gazing into eyes so black they drew her into them. Loving him, needing him.
‘Do we stop?’
Do we stop…? she repeated dizzily, and tried to focus for the first time. His cheekbones stood out on a face taut with passion. His mouth wore the swollen bloom of desire gone wild. His beautiful bronzed body lay half across her and a hand was gently circling her navel.
‘To continue means you accept my intentions.’
Intentions? Each time he spoke she had to work hard to grasp the words. ‘Do you want to stop?’ Long lashes blinked him a bemused look.
He touched his tongue to her lower lip. ‘No,’ he said.
‘Then why ask?’
He smile
d an odd smile, and used that tongue to circle the full pulsing beauty of her whole mouth. ‘So be it,’ he said.
She mimicked the stirring manoeuvre with an impulsiveness that for some unfathomable reason flung him over the edge. Passion roared like a lion, and the whole thing became a hot and seething whirl. He closed his mouth over one of her breasts, nipped her nipple with his teeth. As she drew in a sharp breath he sucked and played and tormented, with his mouth, with his hands. Then, with the glide of long fingers down the length of her, he descended into the cloud of gold at the apex of her thighs.
Pleasure became a greedy animal. Where he touched, she yearned for more. Her fingers dug and scraped and moulded rippling, trembling, slick male muscle. The whole thing grew like a mushroom, building pleasure on pleasure, and it made it all so much more exciting to know his breathing was ragged, that his heart was thumping madly and his body throbbing with a need as acute as her own.
I shouldn’t be doing this. One single brief glimpse at sanity attempted to spoil it. She released a small whimper of distress. Then he was invading the soft tissue of her femininity with the touch of a master, and the door slammed on sanity, along with her ability to control anything, because she was flying, or as near as, her fingers clutching at him as she gasped out his name and begged him never to stop.
The ragged sound of his breathing filled her ears; the heat of his breath moistened her face. He moved over her, hair-roughened thighs parting her smooth ones. A hand slid beneath her hips to bring them towards him and she felt the first probe of his entry, then felt another set of fingers coil into her hair. He lifted her head from the bed, bringing her eyes flying open. Black heat blazed a path of fire right through her—compulsive, compelling, it warned of what was to come. Then he made that single surging thrust at the same moment his mouth smothered her cry.
It was possession in its fullest meaning. He moved, and she responded with pleasure-wracked sounds he claimed for himself. Each thrust sent him deeper, each withdrawal set her quivering in pleasurable response, each slide of damp flesh became an exquisite torment that heightened everything. When he increased the rhythm she just hung on and let him conduct the whole concert, and her imagination helped him by offering up picture flashes of pale skin against dark skin, slender white limbs clinging to majestic bronze. Darkness and sunlight became one glorious entity. He drove her into its seething depths then snapped the last thread of her control with a kiss that claimed every gasp and quiver as they came together as lost-souls in a black cavern that held back everything but the pin-sharp song of ecstasy.
He was lying beside her with his chest still heaving out the last throes of his own fulfilment. A brown hand covered his eyes. Melanie didn’t move—couldn’t. When she eventually managed to open her eyes it was to the grey day pouring into the bedroom and the chill that was already settling on her flesh. The ivory and blue room was about as cold a place as anyone could wish to enjoy a soulless tumble upon a strange bed. The slack-limbed languid aftermath was being replaced with reality, the dawning sense of horror, the flaying sense of dismay. What had she done—what had they done?
She wanted to die here, she decided. She just wanted to close her eyes and die rather than face what had to come next.
The truth. The cold, dark hollowness of truth. She’d expected him to seek revenge in one form or other, but she had not expected anything like this.
‘I hate you,’ she whispered as her mouth began to wobble.
He stopped breathing. The hand left his face.
‘You did this on purpose. You meant to shatter me.’ On a flood of tears she scrambled from the bed.
‘In case you may not have noticed, I shattered too,’ he fed after her quietly.
‘That’s different.’ She began picking up her clothing. Every move, every grasp of her fingers shook with the agony of her distress. ‘You’re a man. You’re allowed to behave like that.’
‘Like what?’
‘Animal!’ she choked, searching the floor for her panties and not seeing them anywhere. Her cheeks were hot, yet her flesh felt so cold it was almost numb. ‘Y-you look at me and see a western woman. Cheap to buy and easy to have!’ she threw at him in shaken bitterness. ‘You did this the last time. Y-you wanted and you took, then despised me for letting you!’
‘I despised you for going from my arms into the arms of your cousin.’
‘Step-cousin!’ she corrected. ‘And I am not going to discuss that with you!’
‘Why not?’ In a single lithe movement he snaked off the bed and came to stand over her. Naked, bold, so forcefully male, she almost sank beneath the swimming tide of her own response.
‘Because you had your chance to listen eight years ago and decided it wasn’t worth the effort.’ Clutching her clothes to her front, she began looking wildly around her. ‘Now hell will freeze over before I will defend myself to you—! Where’s the bathroom?’
‘Wait a minute—’
‘No!’ She swerved away from his reaching hands. ‘Don’t touch me—ever again!’ The breakdown into tears was gaining momentum and she needed to get out before it happened. ‘I adored you,’ she whispered painfully. ‘You know that I did. Y-you thought it a great hoot to relieve the besotted innocent of her virginity.’